


August Angst Challenge in 31 Drabbles - Reylo

by Lilander



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Augustangst, Drabble, F/M, Heavy Angst, One Shot Collection, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-06-21 11:30:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15556740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilander/pseuds/Lilander
Summary: ( @benscalligraphy on Twitter posted a daily prompt challenge for Reylo August Angst.Title says it all: short (under 250 words), angsty Reylo. It's sad and dark and nobody comes out ahead. *Complete! Posted in 9 bigger installments, but all 31 prompts are done.*





	1. Sacrifice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm super new to short-form stuff, and I'm doing this to work on my writing so I'd love any comments or constructive criticism! Thanks, and I hope you guys enjoy the pain.

Day 1: Sacrifice

 

“What was she to you, Supreme Leader?” Hux asks, regarding the body with distaste.

Kylo watches the water flow over her limp fingers, tugging at the strands of her hair. She loved water. An electric hum falls silent as Kylo finally extinguishes the lightsaber he’s been holding since—

Since.

He’d had to love her, to _really_ love her. That had been the sacrifice the Dark Side required. He takes a deep breath, relaxing into the darkness that has finally judged him worthy, finally welcomed him home. 

He wipes his feet on the moss-covered stones lining the riverbank and turns back toward his command shuttle, not bothering to look at the body or at Hux.

“She’s nothing."


	2. Deny

Day 2: Deny

 

“Do you ever feel any guilt?” the Supreme Leader asks his Grand Marshall one night when they’re working late. “For Starkiller?”

“Never,” Hux says, and Kylo can feel through the Force that he’s not lying.

For a few long minutes, the only sounds are Hux’s infuriating mouth-breathing and the soft tap of gloved fingers on datapads. Kylo tries not to think of his father, or of Rey’s tears when he’d asked her to join him. _Ben, please don’t go this way._

When he feels the gentle pressure of the datapad against his fingertips, he’s not thinking of how warm her fingers felt when they touched his, a galaxy away.

“Regretting your life choices, Ren?” Hux asks, his voice full of contempt.

Kylo doesn’t look up from his datapad.

“No."


	3. Ghost

Day 3: Ghost 

 

“Finn.” It’s Rey’s palm on his shoulder, shaking him awake. “Finn, it’s okay, you’re having a nightmare.”

He sits up, then slumps forward, breathing hard.

“Was it him again? On Jakku?”

Finn nods. Rey’s hand makes little circles on his back, over the scar he’ll always carry.

When he recovers, he glances at Rey, but she’s not looking at him. She’s examining a place in the corner, her head tilted upward like she’s staring at a ghost and the ghost is staring back. The soft skin of her throat ripples as she swallows, but it’s not fear he sees there, in her too-wide eyes—it’s longing.

She turns to him, finally, and forces a smile. When he asks her if everything is okay, she rolls her eyes and reminds him she wasn’t the one having a nightmare.


	4. Bleed

 Day 4: Bleed

“Lightsaber wounds don’t bleed,” the med-droid informs her as he dabs bacta on the place where her forearm used to be. “They’re self-cauterizing. It’s a very clean way to lose a limb.”

Clean. Necessary, after he sliced her open and turned toward Finn. Ben didn’t believe she’d find the darkness she needed to stab him in the back, not after everything they shared.

The med-droid tugs a bandage around the stump of her elbow. “Your risk of lingering complications is very low,” it says cheerfully.

“Oh,” Rey says. Her voice seems to come from far away. “That’s lucky.”


	5. Funeral

Rey finds her parents buried as promised in a paupers’ grave in the Jakku desert and stands over them in the red shadows of sunset, at a loss. She's never been to a funeral. On Jakku, no one cares enough whether someone lives or dies to mark the occasion, and no scavenger can spare the water to cry.

She feels him behind her, a gust of silence interrupting the shifting sands. He can’t see her surroundings, he can't even throw out a shadow to stand beside hers.

“I’m standing on my parents’ bones,” she tells him.

He doesn’t say anything hateful. They’re past that.

“Rey. You told me once it wasn’t too late—”

He’s asking her to pity him. Pity, when he’s probably sitting on a throne, ordering another airstrike like the one that killed Finn, Poe, Leia. This is their funeral, too.

That thickness in his voice, that’s his mother’s legacy. And hers.

“It’s too late, Ben.”

She hates how much it aches to say it, but that’s what a funeral is, isn’t it? A body, a memory, a sunset, a too-late.


	6. Pietà

**Day 6: **Pietà****

**Pietà (n)** : _A representation of the Virgin Mary mourning over the dead body of Christ._

* * *

 

Leia dreamed of holding her baby boy and singing him to sleep one last time.

 

But not like this.


	7. Yearn-Brood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As expected, I'm running behind because August is a busy time for me, so I'll be posting several days in a single chapter to avoid flooding the lovely subscribers (a surprising number of you, which is super sweet and wonderful and thank you!) with tons of emails. Let me know what you think!

Day 7: Yearn

 

            The air stills and she’s there, but she doesn’t see him because she’s got her arms around someone he can’t see, she’s swooning in the arms of a ghost. The traitor, probably, or Dameron. He wants rage to rescue him from the yearning, but the Dark Side has abandoned him alone in the hangar to watch her in silence, wishing he could’ve made her this happy.

 

Day 8: Fate

 

            Is this his fate, he wonders, to die in a dogfight with his own fighters, to trade his life and the future of the galaxy for a few minutes while a desert rat, a nobody, a scavenger, escapes?

            Comms go out, then life support, red blinking alarms scream a countdown to the final gasping second of his existence. She’ll never even know he turned on them. She’ll never know. But she’ll live.

           

 

Day 9: Tears

            Shards of durasteel and jagged splinters of black panel, twisted and half-melted from the heat of re-entry, slip like hot tears through the lower atmosphere.

            “Did you see that!” Finn yells from the _Falcon_ ’s gunner station. “Did-you-see- _that!_ We got him!”

            Rey doesn’t need to run a scan to know that there was no ejection, no last-minute save. She knows it from the way the rope between them has gone slack, nothing but a frayed end now, the beginning of her unravelling.

            “Yeah,” she says. “Good shot.”

 

Day 10: Brood

           

           He’d had a choice: a black cowl, a black ship, a lifetime brooding from a black throne—or a white robe, a white interrogation room, a moment leaning, broken, on the shoulder of her white tunic, asking for forgiveness with his hands bound behind him, a white hood he refuses because he wants to look his mother in the eye while she orders his execution, because he wants her to know he doesn’t regret his choice, he wants her to know she’s forgiven, too.

          


	8. 11/Missing-23/Wreath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting a whole bunch of days together to limit emails, since I'll just barely make it before August is over! Hope you enjoy these.

Day 11: Missing

Rey’s been missing for a week when the Resistance calls off the official search, a month when they get the intel that none of them can believe, a year when Finn finally spots her across a battlefield in black robes with Kylo Ren by her side. Two years when they finally manage to plant the right bomb in the right place and Finn presses the detonator, satisfied to know that even if she doesn’t realize it, he'll be there with her, thinking of her in the end.

 

Day 12: Window

There’s no window for him to check in on the stars he used to own, so he draws his own stars, a white mark chalked onto the durasteel walls for every day he’s been here, more or less; he suspects he lost count a decade ago. He used to carve the marks with a pen until the wardens figured out the hard way the ex-Supreme Leader was a suicide risk and they took his pen away.

There’s a two-sided mirror, a one-sided window into his world up near the ceiling, and from it she watches him chalk the days of his life onto the wall, never sure if he deserves better, or worse.

 

Day 13: Nostalgia

“Do you ever miss the old days, Threepio?” Leia asks.

“General Organa, the sensation you might call nostalgia isn’t strictly part of my programming—”

“Never mind,” she says, eyes not leaving the plans she’s working on. Serves her right for asking a droid about nostalgia.

“However, General, I must admit everything seems rather a lot more complicated these days.”

Leia sets down the datapad with a loud clack, closing the dossier on the planned assassination of the new Supreme Leader. “You’re telling me.”

 

Day 14: Love letters

“What are these?” the boy asks, pulling a stack of yellowed paper hardcopies from the box, brushing off the cobwebs.

“Oh, I haven’t seen those in years. Remember how I used to work at the prison?”

The boy nods; it’s one of his grandpa’s fuzzy stories, the ones that feel hazy around the edges. “Well, while I was there an old man died. He’d called himself emperor, once, for a few months or something like that. I never really knew the story. They were throwing away his things and I nabbed those. Figured I might sell them. They’re love letters, all them. Some gal named Rey.”

“Are they worth a lot?” the boy asks, dreaming of the speeder he’ll buy when he takes these down to the big auction house up in the city as he thumbs through the folded sheets: _Rey I’m sorry I’m going mad I’m sorry please don’t leave me here_ —

“Nah,” his grandfather says. “Not worth a damn thing.”

 

Day 15: Might-have-been

From a distance, from the back, all Rey can see of Rose’s boys are twin shocks of curly black hair, and she wonders how things might’ve been.

 

Day 16: Ashes

The war hurts most in her stomach and in her toes and fingers when they’ve turned blue after there’s no more rubbish to burn and the fire dies down to ashes. She huddles between Finn and Poe, missing Chewie’s warmth, wondering how long it’ll be before Finn runs off for the Outer Rim. She hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll forgive him.

“Rey.”

No one else hears the voice and she doesn’t look up. If she does, she won’t be able to resist what’s coming. The same offer, every time.

“Come to me. It’s not your destiny to die out there. Not like this.”

She shakes her head. Poe’s untamed beard tickles her cheek; he’s leaning against her, drowsy, asking her to support him. She’s so tired but when it’s this cold the sleep won’t come.

He’s there, watching her, she knows, close enough to reach out and stroke the greasy half-frozen hairs sticking out from under her hood. She looks up, meeting his eyes through the vapor of her breath.

There are promises, in those eyes. Warm clothes, hot food, a black crown.

 

Day 17: Dream

The little girl offers one sun-browned hand, smiling up at him from where she sits cross-legged in the endless hills of Jakku sand. She doesn’t recognize him; she can’t even see him. He’s just an invisible trespasser in her dream. A ghost passing through. That’s how she thinks of him, he knows, because that’s what she calls him whenever they meet here: her shy ghost.

Once he’d reached out to take that hand but as soon as his fingers got close to hers she became herself again, his scavenger, and looked at him with mistaken recognition: _Luke?_

He thought he’d ruined it, then. But when she’d woken she hadn’t remembered, and the next time he came to her she held out her hand like always, greeting her shy ghost.

“It’s okay if you’re shy,” the little girl says. He likes her better this way, unremembering, letting him be no one. “I wish you were brave, so you could stay here and hold my hand and talk to me. But you don’t have to be brave to be my friend.”

Ben looks at that small brown hand, that fearless smile, and knows he’ll never be brave, but he's glad that in this place, he has a friend.

 

Day 18: Statuary

When the twisted, arthritic body of Emperor Kylo Ren finally gave out under the strain of dark power and old age, the cleanup crew asked the Quartermaster what to do with the heavy, life-sized gold sculpture the old man kept in front of his desk. A pretty female nude, hair in three buns. It might be valuable, even though the details on the face seemed over-polished, worn down like someone had been running fingers over her cheek for decades. The Quartermaster took a look at it and shook his head.

“That’s not gold, you idiot,” he told the captain. “Throw it in the compactors with the rest of the junk. It’s worthless. Just carbonite.”

 

Day 19: Haunt

Ben haunts her steps through the Force and through the tracking function on the comm he’d ordered her to carry when she’d come to the _Finalizer_. He likes knowing where his apprentice is at every moment. In dull briefings he watches her little blinking dot, abandoning himself to the feel of her in the Force, enjoying his prize possession, his favorite toy. One day, he's sure, she'll learn to love him.

 

Day 20: Golden Moment

It creeps Rey out, the way the Resistance veterans get together every month to pound cheap Outer Rim liquor by the tumblerfull and swap war stories, spinning those black years into an endless golden moment, a lie to help them pretend it’d all been worth it. When loneliness pushes her to come, she sits in a corner sipping Corellian brandy, listening, remembering and trying not to.

 

Day 21: Embrace

“Everyone’s going to assume that’s what you are anyway,” Ben says, holding out the package. “You might as well embrace it.”

“I’m not an empress, Ben.”

With a sigh he unwraps the package himself. He shakes out the black satin robes and drapes them over her shoulders, not missing her sharp intake of breath as his hands graze the bare skin above her plain white tunic.

“Yes you are, Rey,” he says softly, gazing at their reflections in the mirror as he stands behind her. He’s never seen anything this beautiful. “You really are.”

 

Day 22: Mourn

“There’s no mourning for us. It’s an honor to die for the First Order. It’s a pleasure.”

“Then why haven’t you done it?” Kylo asks. He'd believed it was an honor to die for something you believed in, once.

Hux smirks. “Supreme Leader, I don’t have time for pleasure.”

 

Day 23: Wreath

Cool morning mist wreathes the old battlefield, greying out the flowers, the cadavers of X-wings and TIE-fighters, the ribbons of decaying fabric--black on the left, white on the right—that sprout like grass from the skeletons long-since covered over with fertile soil, fingers intertwined.


	9. 24/Disaster-31/Grasp II

**Day 24: Disaster**

Rey’s defection had been a disaster for the Resistance. It’s not until Finn’s standing in front of a First Order platoon getting disarmed by one of his former brothers-in-arms in white armor that the rage finally wins out, and he stops wondering if Ben Solo makes her happy.

 

**Day 25: Howl**

No wind howls on Mustafar—only a warm, gentle breeze blows in from the lava flows. It surprises him, the silence. If Kylo closes eyes, he can pretend he’s on a pebbled beach with the summer sun warming his face, pretend like the rumble of distant eruptions and the cracking of rock is only the sound of the ocean breaking against barnacle-crusted rocks.

_Your inattentiveness disappoints me, boy._

His eyes jerk open at his Master’s silent voice in his mind. Even here, so far from his Master’s eyes, he must be mindful. His grandfather had probably never had stupid thoughts about beaches. He’d probably never missed the warmth of a real sun.

“I'm sorry, Master."

 

**Day 26: Message**

“Message for you, General Organa. From Poe.”

“Thank you, Connix,” Leia says, standing with an unsteadiness she hopes the young officer will attribute to her injuries and not the sudden pounding of her heart. “I’ll take it in my quarters.”

“They found him,” Poe’s holographic image says when she flips on the transmission. He’s smiling; Leia never had the heart—or the courage—to tell him that Kylo Ren was her son.

“Dead?” she asks, though she already knows.

“As a doornail,” Poe confirms with a grin. Leia doesn’t allow herself to break. She’d already known, hadn’t she? This is old news. She’s got a Resistance to think about.

“A mutiny?” she asks.

Poe shakes his head. “Lightsaber to the chest.”

“Rey?”

“His own,” he says, and it takes Leia a moment to understand what he means. She can’t help it; she collapses into her chair. “Guess he couldn’t take it anymore.”

 

**Day 27: Heartbreak**

There’s no time in the Resistance for funerals these days, not even for Poe Dameron. They manage as best they can, finding dark corners and quiet moments to share tears and memories. On the fifth day Rey gets so frustrated with BB-8’s busted circuits she actually kicks him.

Of course she feels awful about it. “I know you got banged up pretty bad in the crash,” she says to mollify him, kneeling down to straighten his antenna even though it doesn’t need it. He doesn’t bother to beep a reply. Of course it’s crash damage. Droids aren’t programmed for heartbreak.

 

**Day 28: Freeform (no prompt)**

Finn has to hold back dry-heaving when he sees Kylo Ren touching Rey's shoulders in that familiar way. He knew her mission must have been dangerous, he knew she made so many sacrifices for the Resistance, but allowing him to do _that,_ pretending to like it—he would’ve died before he did that. But she was always braver than he was. She was always ready to do anything for the mission.

He glances over at Leia, whose face is a mask of fury, of protectiveness. She hates her son even more for doing this to Rey.

But Rey survives. As hard as it is for Finn to watch, he has to admit Rey plays the part perfectly. Leia’s son is clearly in love with her, though the signs are subtle—a glance, the ghost of a smile on his otherwise cruel, cold face. Finn doesn’t know where she found the strength to do it, but it was a brilliant move. She doesn’t control him, exactly, but he wants to make her happy. He even lets her give orders to his staff. It’s almost sad, if Finn could ever feel sorry for a man like that.

He’s going to kill a lot of people when he finds out she’s using him.

 

**Day 29: Ocean**

“It never really gets old, does it? For people like us,” Luke says, sitting down beside her on the cliff in the pouring rain.

Rey doesn’t answer. Let him see what it feels like to be ignored for a bit, she thinks, trying to make herself feel less pathetic and miserable for crying. It’s just—this place.

“I’m from Tatooine,” Luke says after a while, his voice almost inaudible under the patter of the rain and the crash of the waves far below. “You know anything about it?”

Rey shakes her head.

“It’s a lot like Jakku,” he says.

And Rey understands, then. He might be an ass, and he might be so selfish he refuses to help his sister and the whole kriffing galaxy, but she knows that he, too, had come to this place long ago and cried at the injustice of a place where water fell from the sky when he’d never had enough of it, he too had stared, dumbfounded, at the audacity of this planet, hoarding enough water to fill an ocean.

**Day 30: Grasp 1**

“Mom,” he says. He wants to hate himself for the weakness in his voice, but he can’t.

She turns. They don’t have much time; the sand around them erupts with ion cannon fire, Resistance fighters and stormtroopers run and shout and shoot.

She’s afraid to hope. She should be. They both know he’s not walking out of this fight. But he reaches out and grasps her hand—so thin, so much more frail than he remembered—in his.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She smiles, and though her eyes fill with sorrow she doesn’t shed tears.

“I know.”

 

**Day 31: Grasp 2: The Fluff Remix**

“Nervous?” Rey asks.

 “No.”

She looks over and grins. Ben realizes he’s figiting with the folds of his black robes and stills his hands.

He’s about to say something cutting before the roar of the three million people outside, packed like cargo boxes into the main Imperial square on Coruscant, makes the blood drain from his face. Rey won’t stop grinning at him like she’s not the slightest bit terrified to stand in front of all those people and rule them.

Of course she’s not. That’s why he’d needed her in the first place.

“Ready, Supreme Leader?” she asks. The gentleness in her voice, like she needs to take care of him and finds this endlessly amusing, infuriates him. But Supreme Leader Rey—he thinks it’s stupid to both be Supreme Leaders, but she’d flat-out refused _empress—_ looks beautiful in her own uniform, white, but identical to his.

She extends her hand. He takes a deep breath, grasps it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snuck in just before midnight (in my timezone) on August 31! Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading.


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